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Palo Verde sky June 29, 2017

As I left the lab for dinner, the sky was beautiful in a way that’s impossible to capture with a camera, at least with point-and-shoot settings. The entire sky had a strong faded-orange glow, almost like the greenish light that signals tornado weather in the Midwest, but everything was calm and quiet. A few minutes later, it had turned a uniform light purple. My working hypothesis is that the thin and even cloud cover spread out the sunset even more than usual and somehow produced the glow.

One of the students here took some photos, but the camera “corrected” for the light and he wound up with entirely forgettable shots of the station. I didn’t even try. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this at Palo Verde, but it’s rare enough that I didn’t want to waste it fiddling with my camera.